Customer Reviews

The Art of Teaching Art to Children: In School and at Home

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
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2 star:		(1)
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This book stands out as a resource for art teachers because it is more than just ideas and directions for projects and crafts. The author shares her experiences and lessons-learned from 25 years of teaching art. As a newly hired art teacher for a private school, charged with creating my own curriculum, this book has become my jewel.
Ms. Beal presents a clearly focused method for teaching art to children with specific information about the developmental stages and abilities of elementary-aged children. She describes lessons and different types of media as they enable children to experience art. Her emphasis is on the experience, not the finished product. By controlling the environment through order and clearly defined limits, children can experience a process and master a technique without becoming confused or frustrated. She focuses on giving children the tools to make art a form of self-expression from the child outward, rather than from the adult in to the child. From her method of teaching, children understand basic concepts and learn that art has many layers -- art class is not just a bunch of arbitrary crafts or projects. This book has geat potential for adaptation to the Montessori classroom because of its hands-on approach and has children involved in every phase of art from the selection of materials to cleaning up.
I already have a fair amount of experience with art and with some teaching, but this book is really good for grounding -- it makes art and art lessons relevant, age-appropriate, logical, and positive. You get the sense that real learning and creativity happen in her classroom, rather than the chaotic, messy, nagging, direction-oriented approach that many of us envision in home or school art classes.

This book focuses on introducing the basic art mediums (painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, clay, construction) for children ages 5 -10. The author emphasizes the importance of letting children work with these basic mediums repeatedly until they have gained mastery of the materials. Gradually they become more expressive in their work. The author encourages children to use their own life experience as a guide for making art; she discusses how to talk with children about their art, which is important to their own perceptions of their art. The book is written from the perspective of one person's experience as an art teacher and what she learned along the way. (I loved the photographs of the childrens' art.) The author adds tips for parents who want to do art at home with their kids. One quibble: she suggests letting children work in acrylic paint at home without mentioning that acrylics are not washable or nontoxic, unlike tempera paints. Many will enjoy reading this art teacher's experiences and advice, as I did, but be advised that the book is about a slow gradual approach to learning fine arts rather than a quick project idea reference.

I originally reviewed this book for my site and found it a wonderful tool in not just teaching but guiding my child to release some creativity - and mine too! I'm not an "artsy" parent by any means, but with this book giving you very easy explainations on tips, techniques, and use of art tools, setting the crayons and paper aside was much easier than I thought. That is one reason I chose this book, it captures both art teaching in school and at home, and allows the child to decide the project outcome based on his or her life instead of telling him or her to draw a yellow duck with a black outline; it tells your child anything is possible in art. The arthur, Nancy Beal, is great at giving parents tips on how to take the six basic art areas: collage, painting, drawing, printmaking, construction, and clay, and taking them from a school setting to a home "art corner".

Going into my first year as an art teacher after many years of not working in the education field, I was nerved up and needed some inspiration and reinforcement of theories, ideas, and concepts I had learned in school so many years before. The book was very readable and enjoyable. The concepts were clear and the anecdotes were very real. The students really came to life and her encouragement and demand for true quality showed in the examples in the book.
The only drawback to this book was that the author obviously came from a school district with much funding and she was lucky enough to have her own art room to present her ideas and use her very creative time savers. As an "art on the cart" teacher in a district with very tight funding, many things did not directly translate. However, the ideas in the book have inspired me to develop time savers and short cuts all my own.
I have found myself flipping though the book several times and rereading sections about materials I am not as familiar with. This was one book that I am very glad to have purchased.

I have a college degree in Art and have always been told by family and friends that I should teach art. I never went into it because I always had a fear that I would squash the children's creativity. This book explains exactly how to develope creativity in children - as a teacher or parent. It is NOT the basics of what makes good art - so it is perfect for people who want to teach art and have an art background but no teaching background. It also can work very well for those without an art background as a way to introduce the five basic media (collage, drawing, painting, clay and construction) to children without squelching their creativity. Just don't expect her to tell you the basics of good design - that isn't what this book is about.

Nancy Beal spent many years teaching before she wrote this book - I trust her when she says " the children will do -----, when you offer -----". She is very good at helping one to understand the type of open questions that will get the children to express themselves. She searched for a way to teach art that would allow her to "connect" with the children and I think she has done it.

I only wish that I had indeed found this book sooner - I might be teaching art by now - better late than never.

This book made me think...the author has a wonderful way of viewing the art of teaching art. As a new art teacher, reading it has been very thought provoking and I am already applying some of her strategies in my class.

This is a great book to get you started if you are attempting to teach art to children. Art can be taught in so many different ways and there are so many different views on how to teach art. This method of teaching is based on providing materials to children and allowing them to be entirely creative with very little direction. I haven't tried teaching this method yet but I am interested to see how it goes. I was looking for a curriculum that gave me a little more art instruction and talked a little bit about famous artists and famous works of art. That isn't what this book is about but it did offer an approach to teaching art that I had not considered. This book talks mostly about teaching children how to use art materials. If the children are comfortable using the art materials then they will have the freedom to express their creativity with those materials. I think this book is valuable and I am excited to use the ideas presented. I think the best thing about the book is that it gives you as the teacher some valuable tips on how to talk to children about their own art. Sometimes what we say to children about their art changes how they feel about their own work. I think teachers have the ability to instill great confidence but too often we don't know how to do that. With the help of this book I hope to effectively talk to my students about their work and allow their creativity to motivate their work rather than my preconceived ideas.

This book is the best I have seen about how to teach art to children, and I have looked at a lot of them. She talks about what kids can do developmentally in art at different ages and she has a great open-ended approach with lots of motivating questions to develop the projects further into the kids' own ideas. She organizes the book into drawing, painting, clay, printmaking, construction, collage, and social studies. And best of all, not only do I love this book, but the ideas I have tried with my kids have been huge successes. She includes lots of practical advice from her 25 years experience and enough material to be doing art all year with kids, and the next, and the next. This book has me covered for homeschool art for a long time. And it is so enjoyable to read with pictures of her students' art.

The personality, character, methods and experience of the art teacher are what make this book precious.

This is a good book for beginning art teachers and homeschoolers, or parents wanting to provide their children with creative experiences. This gives a no-nonsense and logical alternative to hurried, force-to-finish art programs. Unfortunately, being an art teacher in my particular school system, I'm expected to present the most information and experiences possible in a one-year period. We have a lot of student turnover and this program may not work as well as it does in a pretty stable school environment. This author advocates lengthy exploration of a few materials, spread throughout the year, until the students have gained a full-working knowledge and are themselves ready to move on.